America’s Top Parent

What’s behind the“Tiger Mother” craze?

As a “Chinese mother,” Amy Chua set rules for her girls: no sleepovers, no playdates, no grade lower than an A on a report card.Credit Illustration by BARRY BLITT

“Call me garbage.”

The other day, I was having dinner with my family when the subject of Amy Chua’s new book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” (Penguin Press; $25.95), came up. My twelve-year-old twins had been read an excerpt from the book by their teacher, a well-known provocateur. He had been sent a link to the excerpt by another teacher, who had received it from her sister, who had been e-mailed it by a friend, and, well, you get the point. The excerpt, which had appeared in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “WHY CHINESE MOTHERS ARE SUPERIOR,” was, and still is, an Internet sensation—as one blogger put it, the “Andromeda Strain of viral memes.” Within days, more than five thousand comments had been posted, and “Tiger Mother” vaulted to No. 4 on Amazon’s list of best-sellers. Chua appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and on NBC’s “Nightly News” and “Today” show. Her book was the topic of two columns in last week’s Sunday Times, and, under the racially neutral headline “IS EXTREME PARENTING EFFECTIVE?,” the subject of a formal debate on the paper’s Web site.

Thanks to this media blitz, the basic outlines of “Tiger Mother”’s story are by now familiar. Chua, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, is a Yale Law School professor. She is married to another Yale law professor and has two daughters, whom she drives relentlessly. Chua’s rules for the girls include: no sleepovers, no playdates, no grade lower than an A on report cards, no choosing your own extracurricular activities, and no ranking lower than No. 1 in any subject. (An exception to this last directive is made for gym and drama.)

In Chua’s binary world, there are just two kinds of mother. There are “Chinese mothers,” who, she allows, do not necessarily have to be Chinese. “I’m using the term ‘Chinese mothers’ loosely,” she writes. Then, there are “Western” mothers. Western mothers think they are being strict when they insist that their children practice their instruments for half an hour a day. For Chinese mothers, “the first hour is the easy part.” Chua chooses the instruments that her daughters will play—piano for the older one, Sophia; violin for the younger, Lulu—and stands over them as they practice for three, four, sometimes five hours at a stretch. The least the girls are expected to do is make it to Carnegie Hall. Amazingly enough, Sophia does. Chua’s daughters are so successful—once, it’s true, Sophia came in second on a multiplication test (to a Korean boy), but Chua made sure this never happened again—that they confirm her thesis: Western mothers are losers. I’m using the term “losers” loosely.

Chua has said that one of the points of the book is “making fun of myself,” but plainly what she was hoping for was to outrage. Whole chapters of “Tiger Mother”—admittedly, many chapters are only four or five pages long—are given over to incidents like that of the rejected smiley face.

“I don’t want this,” she tells Lulu, throwing back at her a handmade birthday card. “I want a better one.”

In another chapter, Chua threatens to take Lulu’s doll house to the Salvation Army and, when that doesn’t work, to deny her lunch, dinner, and birthday parties for “two, three, four years” because she cannot master a piece called “The Little White Donkey.” The kid is seven years old. In a third chapter, Chua tells Sophia she is “garbage.” Chua’s own father has called her “garbage,” and she finds it a highly effective parenting technique. Chua relates this at a dinner party, and one of the guests supposedly gets so upset that she breaks down in tears. The hostess tries to patch things up by suggesting that Chua is speaking figuratively.

“You didn’t actually call Sophia garbage,” the hostess offers.

“Yes, I did,” Chua says.

When the dinner-party episode was read in class, my sons found it hilarious, which is why they were taunting me. “Call me garbage,” one of the twins said again. “I dare you.”

“O.K.,” I said, trying, for once, to be a good mother. “You’re garbage.”

If Chua’s tale has any significance—and it may not—it is as an allegory. Chua refers to herself as a Tiger because according to the Chinese zodiac she was born in the Year of the Tiger. Tiger people are “powerful, authoritative, and magnetic,” she informs us, just as tigers that walk on four legs inspire “fear and respect.” The “tiger economies” of Asia aren’t mentioned in the book, but they growl menacingly in the background.

It’s just about impossible to pick up a newspaper these days—though who actually picks up a newspaper anymore?—without finding a story about the rise of the East. The headlines are variations on a theme: “SOLAR PANEL MAKER MOVES WORK TO CHINA”; “CHINA DRAWING HIGH-TECH RESEARCH FROM U.S.”; “IBM CUTTING 5,000 SERVICE JOBS; MOVING WORK TO INDIA.” What began as an outflow of manufacturing jobs has spread way beyond car parts and electronics to include information technology, legal advice, even journalism. (This piece could have been written much more cost-effectively by a team in Bangalore and, who knows, maybe next month it will be.)

On our good days, we tell ourselves that our kids will be all right. The new, global economy, we observe, puts a premium on flexibility and creativity. And who is better prepared for such a future than little Abby (or Zachary), downloading her wacky videos onto YouTube while she texts her friends, messes with Photoshop, and listens to her iPod?

“Yes, you can brute-force any kid to learn to play the piano—just precisely like his or her billion neighbors” is how one of the comments on the Wall Street Journal ’s Web site put it. “But you’ll never get a Jimi Hendrix that way.”

On our bad days, we wonder whether this way of thinking is, as Chua might say, garbage. Last month, the results of the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, tests were announced. It was the first time that Chinese students had participated, and children from Shanghai ranked first in every single area. Students from the United States, meanwhile, came in seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and an especially demoralizing thirty-first in math. This last ranking put American kids not just behind the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Singaporeans but also after the French, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Slovenians, the Estonians, and the Poles.

“I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable,” Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, told the Times. “The United States came in twenty-third or twenty-fourth in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.”

Why is this? How is it that the richest country in the world can’t teach kids to read or to multiply fractions? Taken as a parable, Chua’s cartoonish narrative about browbeating her daughters acquires a certain disquieting force. Americans have been told always to encourage their kids. This, the theory goes, will improve their self-esteem, and this, in turn, will help them learn.

After a generation or so of applying this theory, we have the results. Just about the only category in which American students outperform the competition is self-regard. Researchers at the Brookings Institution, in one of their frequent studies of education policy, compared students’ assessments of their abilities in math with their scores on a standardized test. Nearly forty per cent of American eighth graders agreed “a lot” with the statement “I usually do well in mathematics,” even though only seven per cent of American students actually got enough correct answers on the test to qualify as advanced. Among Singaporean students, eighteen per cent said they usually did well in math; forty-four per cent qualified as advanced. As the Brookings researchers pointed out, even the least self-confident Singaporean students, on average, outscored the most self-confident Americans. You can say it’s sad that kids in Singapore are so beaten down that they can’t appreciate their own accomplishments. But you’ve got to give them this: at least they get the math right.

Our problems as a country cannot, of course, be reduced to our problems as educators or as parents. Nonetheless, there is an uncomfortable analogy. For some time now, the U.S. has, in effect, been drawing crappy, smiley-face birthday cards and calling them wonderful. It’s made us feel a bit better about ourselves without improving the basic situation. As the cover story on China’s ascent in this month’s Foreign Policy sums things up: “American Decline: This Time It’s Real.”

It’s hard to believe that Chua’s book would be causing quite as much stir without the geopolitical subtext. (Picture the reaction to a similar tale told by a Hungarian or an Austrian über-mom.) At the same time, lots of people have clearly taken “Tiger Mother” personally.

Of the zillions of comments that have been posted on the Web, many of the most passionate are from scandalized “Western” mothers and fathers, or, as one blogger dubbed them, “Manatee dads.” Some have gone as far as to suggest that Chua be arrested for child abuse. At least as emotional are the posts from Asians and Asian-Americans.

“Parents like Amy Chua are the reason why Asian-Americans like me are in therapy,” Betty Ming Liu, who teaches journalism at N.Y.U., wrote on her blog.

“What’s even more damning is her perpetuation of the media stereotypes of Asian-Americans,” Frank Chi, a political consultant, wrote in the Boston Globe’s opinion blog.

“Having lived through a version of the Chinese Parenting Experience, and having been surrounded since birth with hundreds of CPE graduates, I couldn’t not say something,” a contributor to the Web site Shanghaiist wrote after the Wall Street Journal excerpt appeared. “The article actually made me feel physically ill.”

Chua’s response to some of the unkind things said about her—she has reported getting death threats—has been to backpedal. “RETREAT OF THE ‘TIGER MOTHER’ ” was the headline of one Times article. (It, too, quickly jumped to the top of the paper’s “most e-mailed” list.) Chua has said that it was not her plan to write a parenting manual: “My actual book is not a how-to guide.” Somehow or other, her publisher seems to be among those who missed this. The back cover spells out, in black and red type, “How to Be a Tiger Mother.”

According to Chua, her “actual book” is a memoir. Memoir is, or at least is supposed to be, a demanding genre. It requires that the author not just narrate his or her life but reflect on it. By her own description, Chua is not a probing person. Of her years studying at Harvard Law School, she writes:

I didn’t care about the rights of criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me. I also wasn’t naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.

“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” exhibits much the same lack of interest in critical thinking. It’s breezily written, at times entertaining, and devoid of anything approaching introspection. Imagine your most self-congratulatory friend holding forth for two hours about her kids’ triumphs, and you’ve more or less got the narrative. The only thing that keeps it together is Chua’s cheerful faith that whatever happened to her or her daughters is interesting just because it happened to happen to them. In addition to all the schlepping back and forth to auditions, there are two chapters on Chua’s dogs (Samoyeds named Coco and Pushkin), three pages of practice notes that she left behind for Lulu when she could not be there to berate her in person, and a complete list of the places that she had visited with her kids by the time they were twelve and nine:

Chua’s husband is not Chinese, in either sense of the word. He makes occasional appearances in the book to try—ineffectually, it seems—to shield the girls. Chua has said that she wrote more about their arguments, but her husband didn’t like those passages, so they’ve been cut. Perhaps had more of his voice been included it would have provided some grit and at least the semblance of engagement. As it is, though, it’s just her. “I’m happy to be the one hated,” she tells her husband at one point, and apparently she means it.

Parenting is hard. As anyone who has gone through the process and had enough leisure (and still functioning brain cells) to reflect on it knows, a lot of it is a crapshoot. Things go wrong that you have no control over, and, on occasion, things also go right, and you have no control over those, either. The experience is scary and exhilarating and often humiliating, not because you’re disappointed in your kids, necessarily, but because you’re disappointed in yourself.

Some things do go wrong in Chua’s memoir. Her mother-in-law dies; her younger sister develops leukemia. These events get roughly the same amount of space as Coco and Pushkin, and yet they are, on their own terms, moving. More central to the story line is a screaming fit in a Moscow restaurant during which a glass is thrown. The upshot of the crisis is that Lulu is allowed to take up tennis, which Chua then proceeds to micromanage.

Chua clearly wants to end her book by claiming that she has changed. She knows enough about the conventions of memoir-writing to understand that some kind of transformation is generally required. But she can’t bring herself to do it. And so in the final pages she invokes the Founding Fathers. They, too, she tells her daughters, would not have approved of sleepovers. ♦

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